Hung Ry

Hung Ry

Article excerpt

If you like your macaroni and cheese drizzled with truffle oil, your French fries fried in duck fat, and foie gras in your banh mi, you might make a beeline for Hung Ry, an instantly popular new restaurant that contrives to elevate hand-pulled-noodle soup from a Chinatown staple to NoHo haute cuisine. The concept pervades: grabby name (a feeble play on words), "reclaimed" wood (one wall is papered in raw birch bark, reclaimed, presumably, from a tree), Limoges flatware, a soundtrack that could only be classified as world lounge. Servers, dressed smartly in black, are quick to pour water from clamp-stopped glass bottles and apologetic when appetizers take an hour to materialize. Luckily, they're worth the wait: lightly battered squid tossed with chopped mint and pumpkin seeds atop a smear of guajillo paste; braised short ribs garnished with melon balls, their sweetness giving way to the round and satisfying kick of daikon foam; a colorful plate of roasted beets, pickled radishes, and tiny, pear-shaped carrots.

At the back of the room, a chef in clean whites stands in the L-shaped open kitchen, stretching dough into a long cord and swinging it like a jump rope as he crafts, to order, spaghetti-like noodles, which are bathed in soups featuring unlikely combinations of "natural" local ingredients. …